# A two-week factory bulletin, later treated as a national order

- Home
- Archive
- A two-week factory bulletin, later treated as a national order

      We Can Do It!

      A two-week factory bulletin, later treated as a national order
      We Can Do It!, J. Howard Miller's 1943 Westinghouse poster for the War Production Co-ordinating Committee, asked staff to keep a drive going Feb. 15 to 28.

## Techniques named on the archive record

Glittering generalitiesPlain folks
      Date1943Made byWestinghouse Electric / War Production Co-ordinating CommitteeMediumPosterCountryUnited StatesRegimeRoosevelt AdministrationSourceIdentified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they areSourceWikimedia Commons , retrieved September 25, 2026SourcePublic domain (per Wikimedia Commons) From scan of copy belonging to the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, retrieved from the website of the Virginia Historical Society.
      Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.

      Full record at propagandaarchive.org

## What it said

The sheet shows a worker in a red bandana, sleeve rolled, fist closed. The line under the figure is short enough to remember and empty enough to fit almost any shop-floor push.

We Can Do It!

POST FEB. 15 TO FEB. 28

WAR PRODUCTION CO-ORDINATING COMMITTEE

Words on the poster, as read from the image in the FRAME record. The collar badge is only partly legible there ("...TINGHOUSE E..."). J. Howard Miller's signature is at lower left. Full record at propagandaarchive.org.

The dates are the whole instruction that is specific. Whatever "it" was, the committee asked the plant to hold the pose from 15 February through 28 February.

## Who made it and why

FRAME's tombstone names the maker as Westinghouse Electric and the War Production Co-ordinating Committee, 1943, a corporation speaking to a domestic audience during the Roosevelt administration, medium a poster. The rights line traces a scan to a copy at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, by way of the Virginia Historical Society, retrieved from Wikimedia Commons on 25 September 2026. The archive marks it public domain on that Commons record. No NARA identifier is printed on the FRAME page for this sheet.

That origin matters. This was an internal motivational poster for Westinghouse employees, not a War Department enlistment form and not an Office of War Information decree that women owed the country factory work. The committee's name is on the sheet. The government's name is not.

## What it got right or wrong

As a two-week production nudge, the poster is ordinary and mostly harmless. It names a window of time and a committee inside the company. It does not pretend to be a statute.

What went wrong is the afterlife, not the ink. The figure was later adopted as an emblem of wartime women's labor in general. The sheet itself does not say that. It does not mention wages, hours, child care, or the right to quit. A glittering slogan plus a plain-folks worker can stand in for a grievance the artist never drew. Treating the poster as if Washington had ordered American women into the plants credits the government with a campaign this object did not run, and it flattens the women who took those jobs into a fist and a bandana.

## The constitutional and liberty angle

Nothing on this sheet coerces. There is no penalty, no oath, and no appeal to report a coworker. The interesting liberty question is the one the poster skips: war production ran through contracts, priorities, and, in other offices, conscription of men. A factory pep talk is the voluntary end of that system. Readers should not let the famous picture swallow the difference. A woman who clocked in at Westinghouse was not, by this poster, a conscript.

## Its legacy

The image outran the dates printed under it. "We Can Do It!" now circulates as if it had been the government's slogan for women's war work. The object says less, and the smaller claim is the true one: for fourteen days in 1943, a company committee wanted its own people to believe the shift could be made. That is worth keeping. The national myth layered on top is a second campaign, and it is not printed here.

In December 2020 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a different sheet that borrows the flexed arm and lengthens the line. That object is "We Can Do It! We Can Slow the Spread of COVID-19". The short title on this page stays with the 1943 Westinghouse poster.

## Sources

- FRAME object record, "We Can Do It!", 1943, tombstone and transcription, retrieved for this edition from propagandaarchive.org. Maker: Westinghouse Electric / War Production Co-ordinating Committee. Rights: public domain per Wikimedia Commons; scan noted as a National Museum of American History copy via the Virginia Historical Society.

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/collection/we-can-do-it-1943/